


A Long Courtship

by tempus_teapot (dreadnot)



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Angst, Gen, kmeme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-29
Updated: 2011-05-29
Packaged: 2017-10-19 21:14:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/205274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreadnot/pseuds/tempus_teapot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leandra at the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Long Courtship

**Author's Note:**

> Be forewarned that this was for a kmeme prompt asking for Leandra's thoughts when she realized that Hawke was not going to get to her in time.

In her life Leandra had many opportunities to consider how death would find her. When she had been young, she had been thoughtlessly convinced that she would never die, just as are almost all youths – especially those raised in privilege.

When she ran away with Malcolm, she first heard death pursuing her on templars’ booted feet. On the run, death stalked her on hunger’s biting edge and in the winter cold’s claws down to her bones. Settled and with a life she had built with her own two hands, with her husband and daughter beside her, she felt death closing on her, following the spoor left by her screams of pain during a difficult labor, delivering first Carver and then Bethany. She would have run into the Reaper’s arms just to protect those two tiny people she had given into a cold, dangerous world.

Death only whispered its inevitability on nights when she lay safe and warm in Malcolm’s arms. On those nights, she considered that death might be a friend at the end of a long journey, coming to bear her away when she was an old, old woman with grandchildren and great-grandchildren, mercifully taking both her and Malcolm together like the end of one chapter of a perfect love story that was also the perfect beginning of a new chapter in another existence.

In the empty nights after Malcolm’s death, she considered courting death, selfishly telling herself that her eldest, Marian, could care for her sister and brother, that they did not truly need her. Death scampered on tiny feet, running with plague rats, death hunted with savage screams on darkspawn tongues, death rode the waves that buffeted the ship that carried her home.

But now she saw death in a madman’s eyes.

She begged – there was money, he could have anything.

She threatened – her daughter was a renowned warrior, her family had connections, there would be no escape.

She wept when he showed her the body that lay assembled like some gruesome puzzle missing only one piece.

“My daughter will come,” she promised through the knot of fear that she almost prayed would stop her heart before he took the last steps to completing his puzzle. “She will come, and she will kill you.”

She shook, her entire body wrenched by spasms of terror when he laid her on the table and drew symbols in blood on her face, on her throat, on her chest over her heart.

Then she screamed.

She screamed, and she screamed, and she prayed to the Maker to please, take her mind to spare her from knowing what was being done to her.

 _“Marian!”_

Between the screams that wracked her, that tore her throat until it bled, that broke delicate vessels in her eyes and turned the whites a glaring red, she cried out for her daughter.

Marian would come. Marian was always there. Marian would never, ever let her down.

Her lips moved even when she no longer had a body to draw breath. They still shaped her daughter’s name.

 _Marian will come. Marian will end this._

Marian would come, because her daughter always traveled with death at her side, and Leandra knew that her own long courtship with the Reaper was finally due its consummation.


End file.
